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Belarusian Language Society launches campaign to have street in Minsk named after late writer Yanka Bryl

The Francisak Skaryna Belarusian Language Society (BLS) has gotten down to collecting signatures to a petition urging the Minsk city authorities to name a street in the Belarusian capital after the late writer Yanka Bryl.

As BLS leader Aleh Trusaw told BelaPAN, the organization sent the petition to Mikhail Pawlaw, head of the Minsk City Executive Committee, this past spring. "We have not received a reply to the letter so far. If the authorities don't want to reply, let the public speak," he noted.

The BLS plans to gather up to 10,000 signatures to the petition and then send it to Mr. Pawlaw again. "The Minsk City Executive Committee will have to reply to people's letters within one month," Mr. Trusaw said.

Yanka Bryl was born into the family of a railroader in Odessa on August 4, 1917. In 1922, his parents took him to their homeland, Western Belarus.

He served in the Polish navy at the beginning of World War II and was captured by the Germans in September 1939 but escaped two years later and returned to Belarus where he fought against the Nazis in a guerilla unit.

Yanka Bryl's first story appeared in 1938 and his first collection in 1946, but it is in the post-Stalin era that he produced his best works such as Birds and Nests (Ptushki i hnyozdy, 1963).

Yanka Bryl lived in Minsk since October 1944. He was a winner of the USSR State Prize, the State Prize of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR), and the Yakub Kolas Literary Prize. He was secretary of the Board of the Belarusian Writers' Union between 1966 and 1971, and a member of the BSSR Supreme Soviet (national legislature) between 1963 and 1967 and between 1980 and 1985. He made an opening speech at the First National Congress of Pro-democratic Forces in 1996.

The author died in July 2006.